


Holding a Sun

by sue_denimme



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-29
Updated: 2012-01-29
Packaged: 2017-10-30 07:38:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/329385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sue_denimme/pseuds/sue_denimme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Martha reflects on her relationship with the Doctor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Holding a Sun

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Last of the Time Lords.

It's like in those Greek myths they used to make us read when I was in school.

Quite a lot of those myths were about mortals who fell in love with gods. And they were never happy stories. The mortal would always end up being turned into an animal or a rock, or if they were lucky, maybe a flower.

I hated those stories. They seemed to be saying: you're just a lowly human. You can never be anything other than a lowly human. Don't even think of daring to reach for anything higher, or you'll fall.

Of course, the Doctor is no god. He's just a man. A nine-hundred-something-year-old, double-hearted alien man.

Nine hundred years. So easy to say. So hard to imagine. All that age and experience and knowledge contained in one man. One tall, skinny man who looks maybe thirty-five at the most, geeky in a gorgeous sort of way, and yeah, pinstripes and Converse is a bit of a weird combination, but otherwise he's perfectly ordinary. Until you get up close.

Spend any amount of time with him, and you glimpse more, so much more, so far beyond your scope that you can't help being either so frightened that you want to run and hide, or so fascinated that you want to stay by him and soak him into your skin forever.

The Doctor is like the TARDIS. He's bigger on the inside than he is on the outside.

He's also like a sun. Try to hold him and you'll get burned.

But still he's a man. He's got his moods and his quirks and his vanity and his fears and his bad jokes. He likes tea and bananas, but hates pears. He'll drive you mad talking, for hours if you let him, but getting him to say anything about himself, his inner life, is like pulling teeth. Not so different from a human bloke, really, when you come right down to it.

And his lips are just as soft as a human bloke's, too.

It meant nothing, he said. It was to save a thousand lives, he said. That was all. A genetic transfer.

Are all genetic transfers quite that nice, though?

The thing is, I do believe him. Now. But I didn't then. I thought what any woman thinks when a man she barely knows kisses her like that. And then invites her into his spaceship-slash-time machine.

It was like something out of a legend. This unique and powerful and almost magical being, this force of nature, this man -- more than a man and yet not -- spreading the universe and all its possibilities out before me, telling me that I had only to pick a time and a place, and he would take me.

Then "just one trip" became "I suppose we could stretch the definition". As if he didn't want it to end either.

And there was that air of mystery and sadness about him, too. The naked longing on his face, wide dark eyes shining with grief as he described his home, a home he could never go back to because it no longer existed.

Oh yeah, I was gone. I'll admit it. I'm a woman, and a healer. I wanted to be the one to fix him. I actually thought I could fix him. Ha!

All during that time -- that insane, terrifying, brilliant time -- he filled my thoughts and invaded my heart. I used to stare at the ceiling in my room in the TARDIS, thinking how dare he be so funny and brave and clever and maddening? And what right did he have to be so bloody beautiful on top of it? And how monstrously unfair was it that I'd happened to come along in his life so soon after he'd lost Rose?

Rose. He wouldn't tell me anything about her, of course. I suppose I can't really blame him, though. He deserved some privacy. At least she was proof that he could love, that he had loved. It gave me hope, weird as that sounds.

Still, I wished he would look at me and see _me_ , not just a woman who wasn't her. And he did, eventually. I think he came to love me, in a way. Just not in the way I wanted him to, or thought I wanted him to.

Someone else might blame him for that, might think that he led me on and used me, that he wanted me around only to gratify his ego. But I'm not that stupid or pathetic, and he's not that cold or cruel. Oh, he has his moments. He can be harsh and insensitive and unbelievably arrogant. At the same time, though, I truly don't believe he ever meant to hurt me.

And for every New New York, every homicidal sentient sun, every 1913 and 1969, there were at least two things that were beautiful and wonderful, that I never would have gotten to see and experience without him. Stars and nebulas and worlds being born. Getting to meet Louis Pasteur and Dr. Joseph Bell -- not to mention Shakespeare (and how brilliant is it that he actually wrote sonnets to me? Me, Martha Jones! _I'm_ the Dark Lady! Can't ever tell anyone, of course, but just knowing it is enough for me, it really is.) The rainbow sands and emerald-green seas of the planet Nirvana, a place even the Doctor had never been before -- which meant he hadn't taken Rose there, which meant it was just for me and him.

Once, on the beach on Nirvana, looking out over the sea at suns-set, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him move, closer to me. Close enough for me to breathe in his scent. He smelled of cinnamon and peppermint, probably from the tea he'd had at the restaurant, plus a trace of hair gel and the musk of his aftershave. I felt his arm around my waist. I looked up and he was looking down at me with an expression on his face that I'd never seen before.

And I knew he was thinking about kissing me.

He didn't. Instead, he cleared his throat, smiled, pointed out toward the sea, and started telling me about how there was a certain type of algae that was always washing up onto the beach, along with a mineral from the sediment on the bottom of the ocean, and that was why the sand looked the way it did. But his arm stayed where it was.

Yes, part of me was disappointed, but I wasn't hurt or angry. In fact, I was encouraged. He was beginning to move on, a little. Just for a moment, he was seeing _me_.

Right after that came Cardiff, Jack, the end of the universe, and the Master. And I'm glad now that the Doctor didn't kiss me for the second time, that things didn't escalate between us. If they had, I might never have been able to leave his side.

I was away from him for a whole year, a year that no one will remember except for a few people. A year of walking the Earth. Sometimes running. As I traveled, I saw the most beautiful thing of all. Humans, my people, broken but not beaten, together. Parents and kids, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, friends and strangers helping each other, listening with hope sparking in their eyes as I told them about the Doctor.

I thought of him every day. Not as I had last seen him, trapped and helpless, aged before his time, but as he was on the day we met and all through our travels, youthful and handsome and vibrant and just a little crazy.

Now, finally it's over, and I have a decision to make. I could go back to the TARDIS, back to roaming space and time with him. But my family need me more now. They suffered so much under the Master, and they are among the ones condemned to remember it.

The choice isn't as hard as I'd thought it would be.

I've grown, over that year that never was. I had to. Looking at him again after so long, restored but weary and in mourning for his once-friend, I realize I still love him, but the nature of that love has changed. It's not infatuation any more. I don't want to fix him. I don't want to bind him to me. I don't want to make him forget Rose.

I just want him to be who he is. The man who saves planets, wandering free, never stopping, never staying, but maybe someday finding something he can keep for himself.

It's time to let the Doctor go.

Maybe, just maybe, I've left as much of a mark on him as he has on me.

 

~end


End file.
